Self-similar textured regions in images induce high bit rates in encoding, in particular but not only in high definition encoding, while at the same time raise only limited interest by an observer. The interest of the observer is only focused on such regions in case the region shows discontinuities in structure or luminance.
In principal, the self-similarity of the texture allows for reducing the bit rate by encoding of only a sample part of the textured region and reconstruction of pixels of the non-encoded further part of the textured region by copying pixels of the sample part. Reconstruction is also known as synthesizing.
For instance, Li-Yi Wei and Marc Levoy: “Fast texture synthesis using tree-structured vector quantization”, 2000, Proc. of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH '00), ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, N.Y., USA, 479-488, proposed a pixel-based reconstruction scheme in which a part of a texture region is reconstructed based on a pixel by pixel selection process.
Selection of a sample pixel for use for reconstruction of a given non-encoded pixel can be based on maximal similarity of a neighbourhood of the given non-encoded pixel with a neighbourhood of the sample pixel among sample pixel candidates.